Open Creative Nonfiction

WEEK ONE

EXERCISE

You will choose a specific place to write about; this place should be local as you will revisit it each week. Write three pages in the first person point of view, describing where you are. This assignment is due early in week, to give your peers a chance to write critiques of your work. These critiques will be discussed later in the week. Take pictures—we will share them later.

In your 2-3 page piece, address these questions:

• Where are you?   

• How did you get there?  Not just "I drove," or "I took the subway" but what events led up to your arrival? 

• What is distinctive about it—landmarks, crowds, weather?

• Get tactile—what does the place feel like?  

• What other places in your life does it remind you of?  Follow those memories.    

READING:

Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning, Chapter 1: http://books.google.com/books?id=9E4w6HStuV4C&lpg=PP1&ots=fmgy3kEy9V&dq=%22gretel%20ehrlich%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Honor Moore, “The Bishop’s Daughter”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_moore?currentPage=all

Discussion Questions:

• How does memoir differ from other life-writing acts—keeping a diary, for example?

• Consider the memoirs that have received significant attention over the past 10 years.  What do they have in common?  From the memoirs that you’ve read, what binds them together as a genre?

• Who does a story belong to?  To what extent is Honor’s story her own?

• How do Moore and Ehrlich mete out drama?  Which is more successful overall?

WEEK TWO

EXERCISE:

Revisit your place and approach it as a historian.  See it for its geography, its material culture, and with a longitudinal focus.

In your 2-3 page piece, address these questions:

• What shaped its environment?

• Who crossed, visited, or inhabited it? 

• How has nature and natural disaster affected it?

• How has social change swayed its make-up?

READING:

Jonathan Raban, “Second Nature”: http://www.jonathanraban.com/article.php?id=27

Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia”:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081594

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

• How do both Raban and Solnit connect the subjects of their pieces to a sense of “home”?

• Where do the writers “show” themselves in the piece?  When do they hide behind the information/narrative?

• Where do the details deepen the story, and where are they overkill?

WEEK THREE

EXERCISE: Revisit your place, and imagine a shift in time. 

In your 2-3 page piece, address these items:

• Approach the place as you would have in the past—as a younger person, or before a particular milestone in your life. 

• Or, approach it from the future.  If you choose the future, anticipate how you might change in relation to the place. 

• This exercise might be more fruitful if you imagine the time as during your lifespan, but I don’t mean to limit you.

Mary Karr, “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer”:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=175809

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

• How does Karr marry the sacred and the profane for comedic effect?  Which moments feel more genuine? 

• Evaluate the sense of authority in the piece.   How is she performing “the converted” role through her language and style?

• The story winds a great deal—from childhood, to early motherhood, through divorce and conversion—using a sort of montage effect.  Is this approach successful?  

WEEK FOUR:

EXERCISE:

Change the point-of-view of your piece by describing the place and your relationship to it from second or third person point of view.  Or take the distance further—how would a stranger see this place?  Notice how your relationship to the events change. 

READING:

Nancy Mairs, “On Being a Cripple”: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g3hgJT_kwj8J:www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Essay%2520Documents/On%2520Being%2520a%2520Cripple.doc+nancy+mairs+on+being+a+cripple&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

• To what extent does Mairs treat her body and her self as different subjects?

• Contrast Mairs’ sense of authority with Karr, who has corralled the chaotic events of her life into calm.  How does Mairs write herself into being?

WEEK FIVE

EXERCISE

End your piece.  The challenge here is to create an ending where there might not be one, since the place will always be there. Resist the urge to tie your story into a “bow”—the ending can be complicated, abrupt, peter out—we should just know it’s intentional.

Think about this process as if you’re closing of the door with a gentle swing.  You aren’t halting the story forever, just exhausting your written relationship with the place at this point in your life. 

READING:

Mark Doty, “Return to Sender:Memory, Betrayal, and Memoir

http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/mdoty01.htm

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

• Doty discusses the “reinterpretation of memory”—does his definition mesh with your experience of farming your memories from different vantage points?  Is it possible for stories to ever really be “done” in this model?

•  Does the act of writing the past encourage you to slide from one identity to another? How smooth and facile are these transitions?

•  At what points have you chosen between “honesty” and “coherence”?  When have you felt yourself hedging the past?

WEEK SIX

EXERCISE:

Your last task is to take the pieces from our 5 weeks of workshop and weave them together to form one narrative.

I encourage you to use a montage approach to flesh out the many dimensions of that place and your relationship to it:

• Experiment with time: cross cut between memories and present day

• Experiment with point of view: weave between background and first-person thoughts

• Experiment with location: the narrative can move from the physical location and then revisit it

These pieces will be due Tuesday [xxxx] and we will discuss your challenges in hanging them together cohesively on our Thursday call.